de Young Artist Studio

Every month the museum invites artists to install and demonstrate their art form at the de Young. This interactive program enables visitors to meet artists and gives the artists an opportunity to work with the public. Artists working in various media are encouraged to apply.

Ranu Mukherjee directs constellations of imagery across surfaces to create a conversation between moving images and painting. She culls content from diverse sources ranging from 19th Century Indian lithographs to the pages of Vogue, India, from ancient mythological texts to current events. Through layering and recombining, she explores the construction of culture via creolization, nomadism, ecology, speculation and desire. During her residency at the de Young, she installs a 3 channel video work and creates large scale collage pieces in relation to it, working with cloth, paper, pigment, ink and printed matter. She treats the studio as a porous habitat, taking advantage of the source material surrounding her at the de Young and the Academy of Sciences. Visitors are invited to experiment with collage as an expansive medium, using source material provided or contributed.

Ranu Mukherjee was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She received a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art, Boston and an MFA from the Royal College of Art, London. Her works include her signature hybrid films, works on paper, printed textiles, and collaborative sound projects. She co-founded UK based media artist 0rphan drift in 1994 which continues to operate in adapted form. Her museum projects include Phantasmagoric, a 3 channel video commissioned by LA County Museum of Art, 2016, Extracted: A Trilogy, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco 2015-16, Telling Fortunes, San Jose Museum of Art, 2012. She is represented by Gallery Wendi Norris where she will have her third solo exhibition in 2017. She was awarded a residency at Space118, Mumbai in 2015 and the Kala Fellowship Award in 2010. Mukherjee’s work is in the collections of the Asian Art Museum, Robert D. Bielecki Foundation, Kadist Foundation, Oakland Museum of California, and the San Jose Museum of Art.